Sunday, 23 August 2015

1000 Flowers for the Planet - #586 Ditch the Insinkerator

1000 Flowers for the Planet - #586 Ditch the Insinkerator

I just watched an advert for an insinkerator that
told me it was environmentally friendly. Somehow I wasn’t convinced. Keeping
food waste out of landfill completely is definitely what we should be aiming
for but flushing food waste down into the sewerage system is not the best way
of handling the problem. There are better steps we can take for dealing with
food waste, the first of which is to dramatically reduce our food waste in the
first instance. We do this by eating smaller portions to prevent leftovers and
managing leftovers well by storing properly overnight and consuming them the
next day. However, this doesn’t deal with things like fruit and vegetable peels
or fish and chicken bones, for example. These are food waste items we cannot
avoid, but there are better ways of dealing with them. Fruit and veggie scraps
are good food for chickens if you have a few of those magnificent creatures in
your back yard. The scraps can also go into compost where they become good food
for your garden. Bones can be buried in your garden where they will break down
and return to the earth as they were meant to.

Shoving your food waste down a hole in your sink is
like putting a blindfold on to pretend you’re doing the right thing by not
creating landfill, but this food waste is going into the water system where all
the nutrients from that very same food waste can create the growth of algae
which uses the oxygen in the water and harms marine life. These nutrients should
be put to better use.

The only way I’d own an insinkerator is if the
waste was crushed up and liquefied, then transferred to a holding tank, which contained
the nutrient-rich water that I could then use on my garden – it would be like a
type of fertiliser, but all natural – no chemicals.

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About Me

I am a writer, emerging artist, quiltmaker and public speaker. My current art installation is a work in progress, titled "1000 Flowers for the Planet". Every day, for 1000 days, I will blog one flower with a positive suggestion for how we can improve the planet - environmental, social, moral and ethical ideas. Please join me on this journey, send me your ideas for further suggestions and feel free to comment. If everyone took up only 1% of the ideas (i.e. 10 new actions), imagine the shift in the world!!
www.margaretrowe.com.au